Defensa y Justicia confirmed its new coach after Julio Vaccari resigned from the position after being eliminated from the Copa Sudamericana. He Hawk surprised with the appointment and named Francisco Meneghini in charge of the first team, a coach from Rosario who started under the wing of Marcelo Bielsa in Chile, was accompanying Jorge Sampaoli and Sebastián Beccacece, and has been the main coach in Chilean soccer for six seasons. .
Paqui Meneghini, who will sign a contract until December of this year and will begin working on Monday in charge of the professional team, was in charge of Everton in Chile until the first days of March of this year. His cycle as main coach had begun in November 2018 on the substitute bench of Unión La Calera, a club in which he had a second step towards 2021 after working in 2020 at Audax Italiano. He finally started his job at Everton at the end of 2021.
The detail is that this 35-year-old strategist, born in Rosario, started in big football by chance: he was a schoolmate of Inés, Marcelo Bielsa’s daughter. “I was a classmate of his daughter Inés in Rosario. She knew that I was a soccer fan and she asked me if she wanted to meet him. I sent her a letter of soccer questions and then she called me to answer them. I went to her house and she answered them one by one. He was 17 years old. It was something exciting. It was all football, hours talking about football. We talked about the dead ball, the most used tactical systems…”, Meneghini himself said years ago in the Chilean media. Redgol.
In that dialogue Crazy He proposed to help him start his career as a coach, if he wanted to. He joined an office in Rosario where Bielsa’s assistants worked at the time and when the call came from the Chilean team, the Argentine coach invited him to formally join his coaching staff. The detail is that in that territory he began to earn the nickname of Bielsa’s “spy”, because he was an analyst for that work team and was in charge of investigating rivals.
“When Marcelo decided to accept the proposal, he called my mother because at that time I was a minor and she had to authorize me to travel,” Paqui said four seasons ago in TNT Chile. “The hardest work we did in the week, together, Berizzo, Pablo Quiroga, there were quite a few of us, the main role was to analyze the Chilean players in their clubs. A list of quite big players was followed. At the same time, there was the analysis of the rival and, little by little, Marcelo also guided me to the analysis of the rivals,” he added then. In another interview with the media DT’s Blackboard They asked him about the nickname “spy” that he had earned as a sideman of the Crazy: “I wouldn’t call him a spy. All the technical teams in which I worked had a global vision of the work, although they all had their assigned roles, at the same time they all contributed their vision and capacity on different topics. I analyzed the rivals, and that sometimes included going a few days before the games to the place where the game was going to be played to gather more information.”
His work at the Juan Pinto Durán property continued once Bielsa left, because he joined the work group led by Jorge Sampaoli at the time through his friendship with Beccacece. Although he left some time later with Beccacece to the University of Chile, he rejoined under the leadership of Sampaoli when the proposal from the Argentine team arrived: “My role in the coaching staff has two phases. In the competition phase, what we do is analyze the performance of our own team and at the same time analyze the performance of the rivals that we are going to face to obtain information that is used in training and in the preparation of match plans. In the non-competition phase, the axis of the work is based on the monitoring of the selected and potentially selectable players,” he himself described his task in that coaching staff that also had Lionel Scaloni as a member.
After all that journey, he will have his first opportunity as main coach in Argentina: he will officially begin his work in the country next Monday, June 3 in Varela when the Hawk receive Independiente (from 9:15 p.m.) for the 4th date of the Professional League.
